1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of live multimedia broadcasting, and more particularly to live communications between consumers and multimedia broadcast providers.
2. Description of the Related Art
The presence of high-speed internet connections on desktop computers and mobile computing devices like smartphones and tablets has made live multimedia streams accessible to millions of users. Live multimedia streaming over the internet has made it possible for events like concerts, sporting competitions, and political rallies to be broadcast to large worldwide audiences in real time without the range limitations of television or radio broadcasts. Existing methods of delivering live multimedia to users consist of a one-way multimedia connection between a streaming server and the user client devices. The multimedia connection is devoted to delivering the multimedia stream, either directly or through a content delivery network (CDN), and the multimedia connection is not capable of transferring any telemetry information about the stream such as viewership data or connection quality.
Conventional methods of transferring this telemetry information are based on polling requests, which means a broadcaster must periodically query user clients to obtain important statistics such as the number of users receiving a given broadcast or the average connection quality for those users. This requires a significant amount of network traffic overhead that increases networking costs as the system is scaled up to accommodate more users and increase the frequency of polling requests. User clients are also limited by a poll-based system because they must repeatedly send requests to the streaming servers for crucial information like whether a broadcast of interest has come on-air or whether a closer or faster server is available for that broadcast. The delay and network load associated with poll-based communication systems also make it difficult for broadcasters and users to engage in two-way interactions like sharing user comments or collecting, aggregating, and distributing the results of a user poll in real-time.